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Somalia

John F. Kennedy and the social-service sector that family must be rolling over in their graves over the sham the UN has become. Rather than being an acronym for the United Nations, it must mean something else in code like United Nuts or Under Knuckleheads. (I know that that is a “K,” but it is the sound we are after, but please allow me some literary license here.)

Take the famine that in Somalia caused by a drought. There is plenty of food in the world to feed everyone and farmers have had to throw food away, but it is the governments in places like these that allow their citizens to starve.

In this case, it is the al Queda-backed Muslims in the country are preventing aid from filtering in after people have walked from the drought-ridden southern part of the country in search of food or even gruel. 29,000 children under the age of five have died from disease and starvation during the last three months and most families have had to bury a loved one along the way.

But Friday’s shipment of 290 tons of food never reached them after attempts to distribute the shipment broke out in chaos when government soldiers who were stealing the food shot at the crowd that descended upon them.

In parts of the world where people work together, this wouldn’t happen, but much of Africa is marked by unrest, opportunistic dictators and violence.

Deploying aid to the region is risky. During a similar situation in 1992, US servicemen on a multi-national mission were deployed to the area, but their Black Hawk helicopter was gunned down and 18 servicemen were killed the following year. Still, the few sane members of the UN need to rouse and use diplomacy and/or a peacekeeping force to use diplomacy to deal with the extremists.